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Boy
Scout Troop 53 had a problem several years ago. Without going into the
details of the difficulty, I will share one thing that I found
interesting. We, the Charter Organization, "own" the Boy Scout
troop. Not only do they meet in the space we provide, but also we are to
be integrally related to this group of young men and the adult leaders
that give them guidance. This is something that took that leadership and
me a little by surprise. It did, however, afford them the opportunity to
get an objective party involved to help resolve the tension and divisive
issues that were festering.
Though the presenting problem wasn’t the same for the Corinthian church,
the underlying issue was – arrogant pride. The Corinthians believed that
they were the cream of the Christian crop. An undercurrent of divisiveness
threatened to destroy the church. The people thought that they were better
than the ones sitting next to them. Depending on your station in life,
there was a greater tolerance level regarding a person’s behavior.
In
all of this, there was unwillingness for many of the Christians to leave
their old way of living. We don’t know what motivated their thinking. We
do know, however, that the people in Corinth (the church and the city)
seemed to be litigious, separatist, and sensuous. Paul has already dealt
with some of this in the preceding chapters. Here, in the middle of
chapter six he begins a unit that follows through chapter ten. We will
look at this section over the next weeks.
We
celebrate the birth of our nation this week with Independence Day. The
July 4th festivities are well worth remembering because they
remind us of that which was secured for us by those willing to give
themselves for the cause of freedom. However, we find that the
presuppositions that led to the American Revolution have taken on new
meaning in the 21st Century. The Declaration of Independence
and later the U. S. Constitution were intended to be a
framework for the new nation. In the two and one-half centuries since that
time, we have manipulated the thoughts of those that have gone before us
into becoming what they were not intended to be. We have become the
"greatest nation" in the world. We often cite this while
defending some of the problems we have. Our notion: "Despite our
difficulties, we are still the greatest nation on earth." While that
is certainly true, we are arrogant about it. We sweep our problems under
the rug with a casual dismissal of that which will ultimately be our
destruction.
What will destroy us? Like the Roman Empire, and so many other empires, we
will be destroyed by the weight of our arrogance. We have an unprecedented
freedom that will ultimately lead to our dissolution. However, we have
allowed this freedom to become a pretext for behaviors that our forebears
would have found unconscionable. Let’s look at the text in 1
Corinthians 6:12 –
"Everything is
permissible for me – but not everything is beneficial. Everything is
permissible for me – but I will not be mastered by anything."
I
find it distressing that the Church of Jesus Christ, in any age and in any
culture, would abuse the freedom from the power of sin that Jesus
purchased for us with His blood. The Roman church struggled with this
issue. We read in Romans 6 that there were people that thought that
because the grace of God was poured out to us in Jesus, and because there
was (seemingly) greater forgiveness and grace where there was greater sin,
that they should sin more. Paul’s dismay is noted in the strength of the
admonition – "By no means." Unfortunately, we do not get the
power of this in our English translations.
Paul’s word to us is that we are not to let our freedom be a pretext for
doing evil.
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